This post was originally published in ACM Queue. It all started with a bug. Customers were complaining that their information was out of date on the website. They would make an update and for some reason their changes weren’t being reflected right away. Caching seemed like the obvious problem, but once we starting diving […]

Hello there! I wrote this awesome post on Making the Most Out Of Conferences (for speakers and attendees), however, it is on the new Popforms blog. And I am probably going to post there more than here on katemats.com for the foreseeable future. So if you want to stay up to date be sure to check it out. 🙂 […]

business, projectsComments Off on Don’t Waste Money on Conferences – my tips to get more out of these events

In 2006, I was part of a team that was presenting to VCs to raise money for our startup, and those meetings were some of the most stressful in my career. I get nervous when I have to present in front of a group, and this is especially true when I’m speaking to really important […]

Contractor Research – Guerrilla Style Choosing to outsource a part of your business and your work is a big decision. Many times these are big endeavors that require a lot of time and lot of money. Therefore as a leader in your company influencing the vendor selection through thorough research and information can help set the project […]

business, entrepreneurComments Off on Vendor Research – Understanding the team working on your project

When people read my blog, sometimes people email me in response to something I post, or to ask me about ideas. I generally don’t mind this because it makes me think about problems (and like puzzles, solving problems can be a lot of fun), and it allows me to connect with the people who actually […]

While this post is about managing your manager, a better title might have been how to get your manager to invest in you without them knowing. I am leaving my current role in a couple of months, and the unfortunate part of that means leaving lot of wonderful people. With my departure I have been […]

So a few weeks ago one of my friends who is a CTO at a very successful consumer facing startup was talking to me about how they do vendor selection. We were discussing this as my team was pondering an upcoming vendor selection for a new project. It was apparent almost immediately our two companies […]

business, technologyComments Off on Selecting Vendors – is a startup or established company better?

Recently a friend of mine suggested I take a look at a slideshow Netflix put together on their culture. The slide show is long (128 slides) but I definitely think it is worth the pass through as it embodies and codifies a lot of traits most organizations would like to adopt. Some of these are […]

So recently I came across this blog post on customer service that said: Make it easy for your people to serve customers…Instead, be the Ritz-Carlton. Each employee is given an individual, daily budget to create a wow experience for a customer, or for “service recovery.” (That’s to fix, or even over-fix, an error or problem […]

about me

Kate is known as one of the top technology leaders and CTOs. Her technical background is in creating and operating large-scale web applications. Her focus has primarily rested on SaaS applications and big data. She has extensive experience building and managing high-performance teams, and considers herself a fan of agile development practices and the lean startup movement. She is currently founding her own startup, popforms, but has held roles as developer, project manager, product manager, and people manager at great companies including Amazon and Microsoft. The last seven years she has been a VP of Engineering/CTO for companies like Moz, Decide (acquired by eBay), and Delve Networks (acquired by Limelight).
Kate is a keynote speaker, and she is also the curator of the Technology and Leadership Newsletter (TLN - www.techleadershipnews.com) and has a personal blog at katemats.com.